![]() The American artist Joseph Pennell first suggested the possibility in 1891, when he noted that the male figure in Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl was almost twice the size of the girl across from him-a decidedly photographic proportion, rather than painterly perspective. ![]() Instead of revealing sketches or outlines, X-rays of Vermeer’s canvases show that the artist skipped ahead to the process of underpainting, directly applying paint with a conclusiveness that might imply he was tracing the images. While X-rays have illuminated a host of contextual changes in Vermeer’s compositions, the absence of underdrawings or sketches to delineate the very beginnings of his works has led many to wonder if the artist worked with the aid of a camera obscura-a device or room with pinhole used to project inverted images of a subject o nto a darkened surface. When it comes to Vermeer, what’s missing can often be as revealing as what’s on the canvas itself. ![]() Johannes Vermeer, Officer and Laughing Girl. What’s more, it might hint at the romantic, even illicit, nature of the letter: the sending and receiving of letters was regarded as quite risqué in Vermeer’s day and age (think: getting caught in the act of sliding into someone’s DMs). ![]() The image of Cupid, who tramples on a mask (a symbol of deception), is one Vermeer probably owned-it makes appearances in three other canvases by the artist. But studies have now revealed that the paint was added after Vermeer’s death, perhaps even several decades later. While scholars have known of the existence of the painted-over god for some 40 years, they had until recently believed Vermeer had obscured the image himself. The recent restoration has uncovered a painting of Cupid, the god of desire, hanging on the wall behind her. The work, which shows a young woman reading a letter by the light of a window, is one of several the artist made around the subject. The centerpiece of the Vermeer exhibition currently on view at Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie is the newly restored Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657–59)-a painting which has held its own flirtatious secret for centuries. © Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Johannes Vermeer, Girl Reading a Letter at the Open Window (1657-59). Over the centuries, conservators, scientists, curators, and art historians have discovered a number of surprising mysteries, tricks, and changes in Vermeer’s paintings.īelow we’ve pinpointed a few favorites that have allowed us to see Vermeer’s work in a whole new way. Vermeer’s paintings depict deceptively simple scenes-a woman reading a letter at a window, a maid pouring milk, a music lesson-but Thoré-Bürger’s intuition that they were keeping back untold secrets was absolutely correct. Thoré-Bürger had plucked Vermeer from semi-obscurity-though moderately successful in his lifetime, the artist fell out of fashion soon after his death-and used the nickname to describe the enigmatic, strangely modern, and even literary feel of the work. The French art historian Théophile Thoré-Bürger bestowed the “Sphinx” nickname onto Vermeer in the 19th century. His oeuvre was small-only 35 or 36 extant works are known or agreed upon- but over the course of the centuries intervening since his death in 1675, it has sparked seemingly boundless fascination, speculation, and analysis. The Sphinx of Delft is a fitting moniker for Johannes Vermeer, the 17th-century Dutch artist about whom, despite his wild fame, so little is actually known.
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